Tag Archives: VacuaMœnia

Borgo Schirò, Churchscape VacuaMœnia (Fabio R. Lattuca, Pietro Bonanno)

cat: gal 0110
date: sept 21 2014

time: 22:51


download at archive.org

BORGO SCHIRO', CHURCHSCAPE As part of the series of practices connected with sound geographies emerged in the milieu of post digital era, exploration of abandoned places is one of the most productive field of research for some sound artists. Though the listening prospective, those artists are able to project a new light on marginal spaces and architectures and to make them into fundamental elements of unexpected and fascinating landscape narrations.

This is the case of  Fabio R. Lattuca e Pietro Bonanno and their project Vacuamœnia, which they have been working on for some years now and consist in a capillary sound study of several abandoned villages in the Sicilian hinterland, colonial outposts erected in rural areas during the Fascist era/period or evacuated due to calamities. The new episode of this polysemous and fragmented sonic narration is “Borgo Schirò Churchscape" and it is articulated in a long audio track and presented along with a critic text by the authors, which meditates on the meaning of acoustic exploration of the “Terzo Paesaggio”, based on their experience on the ground and focusing on the details of their meticulous process of continuous refinement of techniques and (trans)disciplinary approaches.

The result of Lattuca and Bonanno’s sonic declination of the explored places is suggestive tale of silences, ruins, oblivion and distance. A story unravelled through resonances of architectures and objects, which raises significant questions on the meaning of stories forgotten by mankind but still cherished in the archive that is the landscape memory.

So, Borgo Schirò’s Church becomes the stage of a “ghostly” performance, in which different sounds (materiality, reverberation, resonance) and space levels are entangled in a continuous flux of elements, opening up, during the listening process, several hermeneutic levels one after the other. Using the authors words, their track is “a lucid dream in which a symbolic introspection took place, guided by various meanings that the site intersected in time and space, until the circular dissolution climaxed with a return to reality”.

Download the article Colonization and Third Scape by Fabio R. Lattuca and “Rappresenting” the sound of the church of Borgo Schirò by Pietro Bonanno [Ita/eng]. 

Notes of the artist “Borgo Schirò, Churchscape” has been composed with field recordings made beetwen the summer of 2013 and 2014. The composition can be divided in two parts, two different but complementary visions. Two ways of looking at the same place from different perspectives. 

At first, the use of recorded materials (glass, soil, gravel, stones) creates, overlapping, delicate layers of sound, symbol of the static space. Later, however, sound characteristics of the materials are enhanced by the extrapolation of their grain, time values and resonances and proposed mixing them to a reconsideration of inner and outer diffusion space.

Special thanks to: Enrico Coniglio, Leandro Pisano, Jon Strandberg from Telinga Mics, Eng. Angelo  Morello from the ESA office and who supports our research and who we met in this years.

vacuamoenia.net
info [at] vacuamoenia [dot] net

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REVIEWS

SODAPOP

L’uscita autunnale di Galaverna (sì lo so, siamo indietro di una stagione…) mette in relazione l’etichetta veneto/barese col collettivo siciliano VacuaMoenia, che vi avevamo presentato in occasione dell’uscita della compilation Crepe. Fabio Lattuca e Pietro Bonanno, fedeli alle linee guida del illustrate nel manifesto del progetto, presentano una ricerca sonora (ma non solo) condotta all’interno della chiesa in rovina dell’abbandonato Borgo Giacomo Schirò, poco lontano da Monreale. Si tratta di un lavoro eccellente: raramente come in questo caso il field recording si rivela come musica, suonata e composta, non semplice registrazione d’eventi sonori (se ben fatto non dovrebbe mai esserlo…) ma scoperta ed interpretazione dello spirito di un luogo. Dico suonato perché i ricercatori/musicisti hanno interrogato lo spazio e i materiali creando, con la propria presenza, eventi sonori: passi, legni percossi, macerie scostate, piccioni che volano via spaventati dalla presenza dell’uomo. Il valore compositivo sta invece in una sapiente scelta nel piazzare i microfoni, cogliendo al contempo il dentro il fuori - la fissità dello spazio interno e il tempo esterno che continua a scorrere- e di attuare strategie ed utilizzare pratiche di vero artigianato tecnologico che restituiscono all’ascoltatore le emozioni e le sensazioni che sono stato del ricercatore (vi rimando, foste interessati al lato più squisitamente tecnico, all’esauriente saggio allegato al lavoro). Le registrazioni raccolte sono poi state organizzate in una narrazione nella quale il luogo, come risvegliato da anni di torpore, risponde agli stimoli e sembra per un attimo tornare alla sua antica funzione: valga per tutto l’incredibile scricchiolio prodotto dalla staccionata che recinta un lato dell’edificio che, catturato con microfoni a contatto, fa rivivere il fantasma di campane ormai da tempo scomparse. Così, nei 22 minuti di sonorità tenui e misurate ma scosse da accenti anche violenti e increspate da ritmiche insolite, all’incrocio fra spazio, tempo e suono, la chiesa di Borgo Schirò viene laicamente risacralizzata. Com’è consuetudine della Galaverna, il disco è liberamente scaricabile dal sito, mentre coerentemente alle pratiche multidisciplinari di Vacua Moenia, al file audio si accompagnano alcune immagini del luogo e un interessante saggio storico, oltre a quello tecnico di cui già si è detto. [Emiliano Zanotti]

LOOP.CL

The project Vacuamœnia of Italian sound artists Fabio R. Lattuca sound artists and Pietro Bonanno consist in exploring the sound environment of abandoned places and especially in the Sicilian hinterland, where there are traces of colonial outposts during the fascist era or places evacuated due to calamities. ‘Borgo Shirò Churchscape' is one track only of a composition based on field recordings made in the summer between 2013 and 2014. The sound material is glass, soil, gravel and stones that have a processing according to different but complementary approaches of Lattuca and Bonanno. The slightest touch of materials handling or birdsongs and rain, generates an eerie silence while rich in nuances. [Guillermo Escudero]